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They're proud that they can operate in just 500MB of RAM for an app that shows scrolling lists of text.

The economics of RAM has changed somewhat but 1990s me is still appalled.

It isn't scrolling lists of text, though. It's user profiles, rich text, colored code snippets, images, uploaders for both, reactions, contextual menus, channel lists...

I'm not saying they can't do better, but the app does do quite a lot.

The Textual IRC client for Mac does this with like 40-60MB of RAM, and that's still using a WebKit view for the chat pane. The rest of the UI is pure Cocoa and way nicer.

Interactive embeds, notifications, inline messages, voice and video calling, an extensive app API...

Seriously. I'm not sure how we got to a place where 500MBs of RAM for apps that don't even have a quarter of the functionality of apps that needed 500KBs of RAM became normal and acceptable.

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